+ General understanding of programming principles(self taught the basics of C++ - made a functioning calculator and "guess the number" game..)

+ Excellent familiarity with Microsoft Office and general computer skills(though by no means a qualified or even experienced computer technician, I am as au fait as 8 hours a day at my laptop can get me)

+ 24 years of being distracted by daydreams

+ Professional experience in teamwork and team leading within a civil service post

Interests:

= Fantasy/ Science Fiction/ New Weird/ Cyberpunk

= World building(map design, location description and detailing, a fascination for weird architecture and nature's more bizarre creations)

= Tabletop RPGs(avid Dungeons and Dragons DM, currently working on the lore and game mechanics for an original tabletop RPG with another writer and an artist. So far it's just a hobby, but serious thought and efforts are planned.)

= Modding(specifically an old Sierra game called "Empire Earth", I redesign the game textures (.SST, .TGA) and swap model files (.CEM) for my own designs)

Wednesday, 23 April 2014

OMNIS - the erias line: Evolution of Plant Life

I have decided, on the advice of friends, to extend the demo to include an extra area. This is to increase the game's 'palette'. Since the first two regions are dominated by metal, brick and other typically dark, industrial textures, I thought the next should be outdoors and natural.

Trees, it turns out, are not as simple to compose as tiled floor textures and sections of wall. The problem lies in finding ways to capture their organic chaos - the arrangement of leaves looks random, but they cannot be compiled randomly without the finished tree looking more like a pile of leaves than a natural growth of them. At first, I tried Photoshop's "noise" filter to generate leaves, but the effect was lacking. The lighting was the problem and, in another valuable step in learning this lesson, I realised that there were no "auto-generate-tree" functions amongst the software's array of filters.

I decided to design clusters of leaves and them arrange them over simple, hand-drawn branch structures, taking time and care with the placement. The trunks were textured last.

The results are good, though the flat, featureless grass texture beneath the trees detracts somewhat from them. Giving the ground 'form' is next on the to-do-list, but here are examples of my trees so far.

(the fir trees were most time consuming, since each stacked layer of branches required having its lightness minutely edited).